Chinese trading firms in transition

The dominance of Chinese family-based enterprises in Southeast Asian trade has been the subject of several studies and is usually explained in terms of social and cultural factors. Chinese values and the relationship between ethnic identity and commerce have been considered to be the predominant ‘Chinese business success patterns’. Academic arguments focus on the strong links among the Chinese (either speech group or clan) community, Confucian values (post-Confucianist hypothesis; see Berger 1988 : 7) and the importance of kinship links for the establishment of external trade relations. The analyses of Chinese trading firms in distinct societies ( Redding and Ng 1982 ; Redding 1980 ; Yao 1987a,b; Limlingan 1986 ; Barton 1983 ; and others) have shown that leading principles of the Chinese management style (including business strategies in a wider sense, organizational principles regarding the internal structure of trading firms, management conceptions, negotiation style, employment patterns, and so on) can be traced back to a sociocultural or even religious background that is closely connected with Chinese identity.